The company remains committed to SecureX despite laying off more than 6,000 and trimming close to $1 billion in operating expenses

Despite cutting 6,500 jobs and reducing operating expenses by about $1 billion, Cisco has affirmed that it has no intention of pulling back from its commitment to its new security architecture known as SecureX.

SecureX involves use of a tagging technology for network visibility and security purposes that would be supported in Cisco gear such as firewalls to identify a wide range of information about a user's network usage, such as applications, devices, location and time of day, so that security decisions can be made in a context-aware fashion.

Two of the main champions at Cisco behind SecureX -- Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco's security technology business unit, and Ambika Gadre, senior director for Cisco's security technology business unit -- remain at the company, although the downsizing is said to include a 15 percent reduction in executive ranks.

Cisco last month said it had largely completed the so-called Identity Service Engine that will be used as part of the SecureX architecture to establish the context-aware policy for an organization to gain visibility about user actions and establish policy-based controls in a dynamic and changing environment. Many analysts expect Cisco to make a bigger push with SecureX later this fall.